A little bit of Paradis

Whenever I saw Julien, it was sunny. Maybe that was because I only saw him in the Summer months when the weather was more clement, or maybe I just remembered him as a very easy going person, who had a sunny nature, I don’t know. But what I do remember was the way he always had time for a smile and a tip of his hat as he passed. He would stop and discuss the weather and the ways of the world.Ten minutes in, and he had changed everything that was wrong with it.

There was never anything pretentious about him. He wrote books, yet he never bragged or carried on about it. Most days, when the weather allowed, he sat by the river with his notepads and plenty of pens, scribbling away at whatever was his current topic. Always busy, yet never too busy to smile, wave or have a word. His leathery, wind worn complexion, red and rugged, always ready to facilitate a conversation. He never minded interruption, as long as you didn’t ask what he was writing about.

He had long passed the age of youth, yet his books kept him in good fortune. The house he owned, just yards from the riverside where he sat, was large and rambling, bought with the proceeds of his work, along with the large motorboat bobbing in the wake of the river boats cruising the river at any given moment. At certain times of year, swans would frequent that part of the river where Julien sat, and he would feed them with bread and wild bird food. He said he recognised each one of them, even gave them all names. More than that; he said they knew him too, though I suspect all they knew was, he was the chef in their favourite outdoor restaurant.

Well, Julien was a bit of a celebrity in our village. It gave us all a nice feeling to think that this very genteel man, was talented enough to sell books, and to sell enough to make vast amounts of money. Julien once told us that he had come from France when he was just knee-high to a grasshopper. His mother was French, his Father Dutch, and when his Mother was widowed and left alone with two young children, she boarded a ferry to England and stayed with some friends until she finished grieving. By then, the children were settling into English life, and she didn’t feel she should pull them away. So the status quo prevailed, and life went on, and little Julien began his writing. At first he wrote to cover the loss of his Father, retreating behind the pages, and soon he was sending off essays and pieces to various magazines. It didn’t take long for publishers to hear of his talent, and the first book was on the way.

After that, book followed book, and Julien made a good life for himself and his family. An idyllic life some would say. But all was not what it seemed in Julien’s life. For one thing, the loss of his Father deeply affected this quiet man, and for another – well, for another, there was his brother, older by three years, who was, by some un-written rule, never spoken about. No-one ever knew what happened to Marc, but somewhere in their past, at the age of twenty, Marc vanished forever. Of course, there was much speculation about his disappearance, mainly the idea that he had fallen into the water where the boat now sits, but the police had searched and combed the area in a wide radius, and never found a single clue. No-one had ever seen Marc on that day, and after a few years the case was written off as another missing person case.

But talk is cheaper than vino, and talk in the village was rampant at the time of Marc’s disappearance. Talk of sibling rivalry floated high in the air. You see, Marc was also a writer, and although Marc wrote in plentiful amounts, he was in Julien’s shadow, and couldn’t shake it off. Even more talk revolved around the fact that Marc was a better writer, and jealousy surrounded his demise. But nothing was ever proven, just gossip, village here say. Well, Julien took it all on the chin, and had never faultered in his manner, ever the shy man that he was. Over time, Marc faded into the past, and life went on -

Then, thirty years after his disappearance, Marc returned to the village of his childhood, and what he had to say, rocked the village to it’s foundations -

Paradis